Places to Visit
Ghost Town

It is a well-known neighborhood of the Fethiye district of Muğla. Kayaköy consists of two very different settlement areas. The first of these is a neighborhood whose former name was Levissi; it was established in the early 19th century, built along the hillsides, and although it is a relatively recent settlement with an important place in tourism, it had grown to the size of a town with a population of 3,000, entirely Greek, during the final years of the Ottoman Empire. Although the houses were reduced to ruins by the 1957 Fethiye Earthquake, it attracts great interest from tourists as a living museum. The other is Kayı Village, which has been mentioned in Ottoman cadastral registers since 1512. Records exist, especially in cadastral register number 39, indicating that Turkmens belonging to the Kayı tribe of the Oghuz settled in the region. Among the places to visit and see in Kayaköy are the large and small churches and fourteen chapels. There is also a pottery workshop (Çömlekhane) next to the small church. From the road by the small church, it is possible to reach Soğuk Su Cove, accessible only by sea or on foot, in approximately forty minutes. With the population exchange that took place in 1923, the Greeks living in Levissi migrated to Greece, while immigrants arriving from Thessaloniki and its surroundings settled in Kayaköy. Discussions continue regarding a more productive use of Old Kayaköy from a tourism perspective. Yunus Nadi Abalıoğlu (Yunus Nadi of the Abalızade family), the founder of Cumhuriyet newspaper and a close associate of Atatürk, was born in Kayaköy in 1880 while his family was spending the summer there.